1 Loneliness

9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 3 ላ 1 ሌ Loneliness Exiled, wandering, dumbfounded by riches, Estranged among strangers, dismayed by the infinite sky, An alien to myself until at last the caste of the last alienation. —Delmore Schwartz, “Abraham” IMMIGRANTS The Jewish encounter with America began with two dozen refugees setting foot in New Amsterdam, the city on the Hudson River soon to be renamed New York, in 1654. No red carpet greeted them. Governor Peter Stuyvesant wished these members of what he called “the deceitful race” and “blasphe- mers of the name of Christ” to leave. He was overruled by the directors at the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam. The newcomers stayed and were soon joined by brethren who established communities in Philadelphia, Newport, Charleston, and Savannah. A hundred or so American Jews fought in the Revolutionary War on behalf of a country unique in history, a country that from its very inception guaranteed the free exercise of religion. In the not-so-distant past, the Jews of Europe had lived at the whim of their hosts, who could—and did— revoke Jews’ residential rights at any time. Jews had been expelled from Vienna in 1670 and from Prague in 1744. They were commonly seen— and saw themselves—as temporary settlers, as tolerated strangers. Resigned to political powerlessness, they learned to dwell in Jewish tradition itself, poet Heinrich Heine said, as a “portable homeland.” George Washington, by contrast, assured the Jews of Newport that the U.S. government, dedi- cated to religious tolerance, “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” 3 From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 4 Though accepted as full citizens, Jews remained obscure in influence and small in number. Fewer than three hundred Jews lived in New York on the eve of the Revolution. Only 3,000 or so resided in the young republic by 1820—mostly descendents of the Jews expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century. Starting in the 1820s, however, after the “Hep! Hep!” riots terrorized the Jews of Central Europe, a wave of German- speaking Jewish immigrants fled from Bavaria, Prussia, and Posen. Some of these “German” Jews—such as the founders of Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue—brought with them Reform Judaism. Discarding ritual requirements and ideas of ethnic distinctiveness, throwing off the yoke of the law, these immigrants preferred to see Judaism not as a body of revealed law but as a set of ethical teachings. This only eased their way into American society, and most acculturated fast. Some of the German Jews made it big: investment banker Marcus Goldman; retailer Benjamin Bloomingdale; Nathan Straus of Macy’s; Levi Strauss, who patented “riv- eted clothing” and clothed America’s westward pioneers in jeans; mining millionaire Meyer Guggenheim. By 1880, more than a quarter million Jews lived in the United States. But this, in retrospect, would come to be seen merely as the first and smaller wave of immigration. Between 1881, when the assassination of Czar Alexander II roiled Russia, and 1924, when the U.S. National Origins Immigration (Johnson-Reed) Act stemmed the tide of immigrants, 2.5 million Jews from Eastern Europe—Yiddish-speakers from the shtetls of Rus- sia, Galicia, Lithuania, Hungary, and Romania, the poorest and least educated of Europe’s Jews—landed on American shores. Driven away from the old country by pogroms, persecution, and poverty, and drawn by the promise of prosperity in the goldeneh medina (the Golden Land, in Yiddish), they gave New York City the largest Jewish concentration of any city in history. By 1910, they made up a quarter of the city’s dwellers. By 1915, 1.4 million Jews made their home in New York. And by the end of World War I, more Jews lived in New York City than in Western Europe, South Amer- ica, and Palestine put together. Needless to say, some Americans were no more pleased by this inundation than Stuyvesant had been two and a half centuries before. In 1921, Albert Johnson, chair of the House Immigration Committee, quoted the head of the U.S. Consular Service as complaining that the recent Polish Jewish immigrants were “filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits.” Several years earlier, in The Education of Henry Adams (1918), the grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams had remarked on the 4 RUNNING COMMENTARY From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 5 threat the immigrants posed. “Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow—not a furtive Jacob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs—but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he—American of Americans.” Along with the peddlers, tailors, bookbinders, shoemakers, and silver- smiths, the wave of Eastern European immigration carried ashore pious tra- ditionalists who brought into the New World a reverence for study— rabbinic luminaries who would put their indelible stamp on religious life in the new country. The Orthodox among them started day schools (such as Yeshivah Torah Vadaath), yeshivas (such as the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theo- logical Seminary), synagogues (such as the Eldridge Street synagogue), and newspapers (such as the Yiddishes Tageblatt). Hasidic rebbes recreated their communities in Boro Park, Williamsburg, and Crown Heights. Scholars such as Solomon Schechter and Louis Ginzberg imported their European erudition to the Jewish Theological Seminary, which opened its doors in 1887. Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, immigrated in 1889. Bernard Revel, founder of Yeshiva College (later Yeshiva Univer- sity), arrived in 1906.1 Still more numerous were the Jewish radicals who took to trade unions and socialism, men and women who pioneered the labor movement to relieve their bitter conditions in the sweatshops. Not all socialists in America were Jews, but Jews were disproportionately represented in the socialist ranks. After 1900, Jews predominated in socialist trade unions such as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Amalgamated Cloth- ing Workers of America. Jews Adolph Strasser and Daniel De Leon led the Socialist Labor Party. The Socialist Party, which broke away from the SLP, was led by Jews such as Morris Hillquit (born Moishe Hillkowitz) and Victor Berger, the first socialist congressman.2 (The only other socialist congressman, a two-term representative from the Lower East Side named Meyer Lon- don, elected in 1914, 1916, and 1920, was also a Jew.) More than a third of the Communist Party membership in New York—concentrated in the upper Bronx—was Jewish. By 1917, the Yiddish socialist Forward, edited by an ex- yeshiva student named Abraham Cahan—nicknamed Der Proletarisher Magid (the proletarian preacher)—enjoyed 150,000 subscribers. It was joined in 1922 by a smaller Yiddish Communist paper, Freiheit. Part of the Jewish Left consisted of intellectuals, many of whom would be driven even further to the Left by the Depression. Playwright and essay- ist Lionel Abel later quipped that New York City of the 1930s used to be the most interesting part of the Soviet Union, and indeed into the New LONELINESS 5 From “Running Commentary” by Benjamin Balint. Excerpt courtesy of PublicAffairs, the publisher. 9781586487492-1cx_PublicAffairs 6.125 x 9.25 3/15/10 2:50 PM Page 6 York of the Red Decade crowded a mixed multitude of crypto-Communists and Communist sympathizers, Stalinoids and Stalinophiles, Marxist maver- icks and socialist schlemiels and parlor pinks. Stalinists may have dominated the Left, but because Marxist politics acted in those days like a theology, there was plenty of heresy and schism to go around. Now-forgotten factions and splinters of factions proliferated like breakaway Hasidic sects: Shacht- manites and Shermanites, Cannonites and Lovestoneites, Fieldites and Fos- terites. The distinctions between them were usually apparent only to those on the inside, and a decade or two later few would remember the questions over which these factions had so bitterly divided. Finally, starting in the mid- 1930s, these groups were joined by the Weimar émigré intellectuals, includ- ing Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Hans Morgenthau—Hitler’s gift to America. YOUNG TROTS Those who would midwife Commentary magazine into the world resembled nothing so much as a loosely knit, self-formed Family (as future paterfamilias Norman Podhoretz would call it), bound by a common language and frame of reference, a shared ordering of values, and an intense crisscrossing alertness to one another’s judgments. These were kinsmen of a common cause, a common past, and a common set of ancestors. They practiced their hypercritical intellectual gamesmanship—a form of close infighting—en famille. The Family for the most part emerged from the dissident, fiercely anti- Stalinist Trotskyists, a tiny minority even on the Left. Many had belonged to the Trotskyist Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), City College division. They had looked to Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovich Bronstein) as the “good” revolutionary: a founder of the Soviet state, theoretician of the Rus- sian Revolution, leader of the Red Army, archinternationalist creator of the Fourth International (antagonist of Joseph Stalin’s Third International, or Comintern), brilliant polemicist and writer of manifestos, a man intoxicated with politics who took literature with high seriousness. His example encour- aged the Young Trots to feel like a small but potent ideological vanguard.

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